


Paschal Lamb

by RoseRose



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Death, Gen, Genocide, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Holocaust, Hurt No Comfort, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Mass Graves, POV Jewish Character, Religious Guilt, Self-Hatred, Survivor Guilt, Torture, marvelbingo2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 10:41:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18658786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseRose/pseuds/RoseRose
Summary: PLEASE HEED THE WARNINGS/TAGS!Bucky Barnes is Jewish and has been forced into working for HYDRA for seventy years, a Nazi organization. This is what happens when he realizes what that implies.Please heed the warnings- this goes into a lot of guilty feelings, and triggery issues with the Holocaust.For the Hate square for my Marvel bingo





	Paschal Lamb

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my betas, Aprilmallick and Medha.
> 
> I am a Jewish author writing this fic- this fic happened when I was discussing on Discord the idea of a Jewish Bucky Barnes and what that implies, and I couldn't get this out of my head.
> 
> If you have any questions about the content of this fic before reading it, you can leave a comment or message me on my Tumblr, tehroserose

I don't even remember where I heard about it, but I remember when I read about it. Tony had taught me how to use the tablets and screens he had all over the tower, and it felt like everyone had explained Google, even Steve. So, when I used the internet to look up the Holocaust, I thought I knew what I was doing.

 

I didn't.

 

Oh, I knew the mechanics of it, but I didn't realize what I was getting myself into. Apparently when both HYDRA and my own brain want to forget something, it stays well forgotten until something forces me to remember. As soon as I saw the first words, I remembered that one camp the 107th had run into before we got captured by HYDRA and Steve saved me. I found out later it wasn’t a known death camp, but HYDRA had their own, working them to create their weapons. That actually made it worse, because they aren’t memorialized the way so many of the dead have been. God, the thin, starving people. The Yiddish that was my first language (just as Steve's was Gaelic) was very useful, but it meant that I heard all the suffering that the people went through, because I was one of the only people who understood. I was translating for all these desperate people, especially the dying ones. They couldn't get their thoughts out in German or Polish or whatever, they needed to use the Yiddish that was also their first language.

 

I had to be a tough soldier, but at the end of the day, all I could do was think about how easily that could have been me if my parents hadn't moved to Brooklyn. I was just as Jewish as the people who died in that camp. The worst were the ones who died after we freed them. It was awful, like a strange mockery of the line in the Passover Haggadah about escaping bondage and being free, they died free, but they never got to enjoy being freed from the horrors they had been living.

 

I lost count of how many times I threw up while we were at that camp.

 

As I sat there, snowed under the weight of those memories, a dawning, horrifying realization came over me. I had spent _seventy years_ working for the same type of people who did that to my tribe. I dashed to the bathroom and threw up, just like I had all those years ago, choking on my memories.

 

What the fuck am I that I could work for people like that?

 

I threw up again.

 

All those desperate people I met, whom I had seen become so happy at being free even when they were dying. I had betrayed every single one of them. All those bodies of the dead in mass graves, the ashes of the long dead, I had betrayed every one of them. I was a traitor. Not to the United States, but to my Jewish people. I had betrayed my dead.

 

I whispered the Mourner's Kaddish over and over under my breath.

 

Suddenly I stopped. I didn't deserve to mourn any of them. Not me, who betrayed them so thoroughly. Not me, who tainted the memory of their sacrifice. Not me, who helped their persecutors as much as any German _Gestapo_.

 

Hell, even under the Soviets, when I worked for them, I was betraying my people. My mother fled a Russian pogrom. They weren't Soviets yet, but they still murdered my family. I was a slave to the enemy. I had not, to return to my earlier Passover comparison, left Egypt, but instead I was acting as Pharaoh's man. I had served the evil that had driven my people into the sea. I was a tool of the Pharaoh who broke my people to pieces and I had never even told him to let my people go. I don't believe in God, but if I did, I wouldn't understand how he could do this to me.

 

One of the people I killed as the Soldier, one they wanted me to kill face to face, recited the Sh'ma as he died.

 

They still believed. No one knows, but I know that man I killed was as much a martyr as Rabbi Akiva. I may not believe anymore, but I do respect those beliefs of my childhood. Who the fuck am I, a broken man, Pharaoh's servant, to question someone else's beliefs? All I know is that however much blood I thought I had on my hands before this, now it is ten times worse.

 

I feel wetness on my cheeks.

 

I don't deserve to cry, to mourn for my people. Those numbers that I saw, the amount of Jews dead due to the cause I served, it is unimaginable. To be Jewish is to know that your place is precarious, that they may come for you, but the sheer scale of what I learned was beyond the massive pogroms by the Russian Tsar my mother fled. I saw the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. _Shoah_ means calamity, and that is what it was. That many deaths couldn't be anything other than one. And I, I lost the right to grieve those people I saw in the camp, and all the others.

 

I have never left Egypt.

 

Now, with nothing left in my stomach, I still dry-heave at the horrors I have been a part of. All I can see is my hands dripping in blood. Nothing I touch will ever be Kosher again because the blood will cover it all. I curl up on the floor of the bathroom, head to my knees and begin to rock. It is a comfort I do not deserve, but one I need. I don't hear the keening that starts to leave my own throat. As I hear footsteps rush towards the bathroom, the keening shifts into prayer. Maybe I don't deserve to mourn, but the forgotten dead deserve someone to say Kaddish for them. So I say it, over and over and over.

 

That's how Tony finds me, rocking, keening and praying.

 

He touches my arm.

 

I flinch. He shouldn't be covered in blood.

 

I don't deserve him.


End file.
